“We open here officially July 7. The large Marquis theater will seem intimate because we’ll have 40 audience members onstage. In ’85, we played a small-size venue. Not for us. You can’t make African spotted pygmy elephants vanish in small areas. We need bigness, glamorness.

“We bring in airport-security metal detectors, walk-through archways, gigantic boxes, tractor-trailer trucks. Huge two-handled saws that get used on a showgirl. Locally, we’re sourcing a very dead tilapia, because nightly we produce a theatergoer’s cellphone from inside the fish.

“And a nice big red ball, like from a schoolyard? I train it onstage like a dog. Put it through hoops, bend it to my will. To perfect this, I worked on it an hour every night for 18 months. Sometimes there’s three ways to do something and we’re always re-creating it better. After five years, I said it’s still not right and I need a new ending. Now it’s on all cylinders.

“Vegas is our laboratory. We have a 500-foot stage in a nearby building. Shortest feat we ever perfected was five months. The longest? Just to get the elephant on its feet took six years.

“We’ll do only six weeks here. No extensions! We have a permanent Vegas gig and had to charm them to get out for this short time. Penn and I have done five shows a week for 14 years. You need two days a week to run out for maybe Detroit or Baltimore.”

Give me one secret. One. Just one.

“Magic’s unforgiving. You can overlook a pianist’s wrong note. If an illusion’s not perfect, it’s awful. We wear two gray suits. Penn, more of a talking narrative, takes his jacket off then puts it on. I’m more into the tricks.”

So?

“So I wear three identical ones and change to whatever’s needed for the effect.”

Stamps that score

So, to rejuice the USPS, new sports-related stamps are being commemorated. One features Esther Williams, who, at 91, left us in 2013. Swimming champ, major movie star, “America’s Mermaid” splashed underwater in big, wet MGM extravaganzas of the ’50s.

West Virginia’s Greenbrier opened its new tennis center this weekend. Among the 2,500 enthusiasts — Steffi Graf and her children, who first went bowling, Gary Player, Jack Nicholson, Arnold Palmer, Carleton Varney, Lee Trevino — talk was about another stamp honoring “Little Mo”: Grand Slam winner Maureen Catherine Connolly Brinker (1934-1969), considered one of the greatest femme players ever.